XFCE-DESKTOP: Evince vs Atril

[Danielsan]

Hi guys, I had to uninstall Evince in favor of Atril because new release of Evince in Testing requires Nautilus. However that solution remove some packages from Gnome and install other ones from Mate not a very great deal...

[Bloom]

Since XFCE 4.12 still uses GTK2, it is a bit overkill to use several packages from Gnome 3 like Evince, EOG and File-Roller, since they will add GTK3 libraries to your system. You can save quite a bit of memory by purging those and installing the equivalent ones from MATE:

Code: Select all

sudo apt purge evince eog file-roller
sudo apt -y install atril eom engrampa


To integrate Engrampa with Thunar, there is unfortunately a tap file missing.
Create the following text file engrempa.tap in your home directory:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
#
# engrampa.tap - Wrapper script to create and extract archive files
# in Thunar, via the thunar-archive-plugin, using the
# engrampa archive manager.
#
# $Id: engrampa.tap 1468 2006-07-02 14:02:38Z benny $
#
# Copyright (c) 2006 Benedikt Meurer <benny@xfce.org>.
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
# Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
# any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
# ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
# FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
# more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
# this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple
# Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.
#
# determine the action and the folder, $@ then contains only the files
action=$1; shift;
folder=$1; shift;
# check the action
case $action in
create)
exec engrampa "--default-dir=$folder" --add "$@"
;;
extract-here)
exec engrampa "--extract-to=$folder" --force "$@"
;;
extract-to)
exec engrampa --extract "$@"
;;
*)
echo "Unsupported action '$action'" >&2
exit 1
esac


Then do:

Code: Select all

sudo cp engrampa.tap /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/thunar-archive-plugin/
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/thunar-archive-plugin/engrampa.tap


For a 32 bit system, replace x86_64 in the two lines above by i386.

[Bloom]

I forgot: XFCE normally uses Ristretto as its picture viewer, epdfviewer or xpdf as its document viewer and xarchiver as its universal archives handling program. Unfortunately, they don't work nearly as good or as nice as what Gnome 2 used to have. That's why I replace them on any XFCE desktop I install for myself or for others by eom, atril and engrampa from MATE. Much better!

[deborah-and-ian]

new release of Evince in Testing requires Nautilus

That's not true.

https://packages.debian.org/buster/evince

Same goes for Atril. It doesn't pull in a bunch of Mate stuff, just 2 small Mate packages that together pull in maybe 3MB of dependencies. The rest is the usual gtk stuff that pretty much every gtk app pulls in.

[debiman]

Since XFCE 4.12 still uses GTK2, it is a bit overkill to use several packages from Gnome 3 like Evince, EOG and File-Roller, since they will add GTK3 libraries to your system.

xfce4 has been relying on both gtk2 and gtk3 for a long time now, so the libraries are likely already installed.
i think they're planning on switching to gtk3 only, maybe you misunderstood that.

[Danielsan]

Someone suggested me to install Xreader from Mint Apps, I found the repo:

http://packages.linuxmint.com/search.ph ... rd=xreader

[GarryRicketson]

But how long will it work , if it works at all ?
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

Ubuntu, Mint or other derivative repositories are not compatible with Debian!

[Danielsan]

I can also compile it by myself as you can see there are very few dependencies to build the package:

https://github.com/linuxmint/xreader

However I have a FrankenDebian, it is Testing with pinning to Multimedia, Sid and Experimental, so no fear!

[stevepusser]

xreader is up to 1.6.1: http://ppa.launchpad.net/embrosyn/xapps ... x/xreader/

[debiman]

why are people so obsessed with pdf readers?
i use mupdf.
i also used to use xpdf.
both work & allow me to read pdfs, copy text from it etc.

[Bloom]

I chose Atril because I wanted a general document viewer, not just pdf.

[Danielsan]

why are people so obsessed with pdf readers?
i use mupdf.
i also used to use xpdf.
both work & allow me to read pdfs, copy text from it etc.

I use both. In particular MuPDF is one of the best PDF-Reader, it is not a coincidence that is a project made by Artifex (Ghostscript), Xpdf is a fallback solution when you have problem to some exotic or old PDF.

The problem with the PDF readers, from my point of view, is because I want an integrated reader able to handle correctly all the kind of PDF. Evince is a good option but is too way much integrated in Gnome3, even if I have decent computer I would avoid to have a lot of runtime active because GTK2, GKT3, QT, etc...

[debiman]

The problem with the PDF readers, from my point of view, is because I want an integrated reader able to handle correctly all the kind of PDF.

ok, maybe my usage habits just don't include "all the kind of PDF", because i never ever had a problem opening a pdf with mupdf.

[None1975]

i use mupdf.i also used to use xpdf.both work & allow me to read pdfs, copy text from it etc.

+1! I also use mupdf.

[Danielsan]

The problem with the PDF readers, from my point of view, is because I want an integrated reader able to handle correctly all the kind of PDF.

ok, maybe my usage habits just don't include "all the kind of PDF", because i never ever had a problem opening a pdf with mupdf.

You missed an importat part: I want an integrated reader. MuPDF is one of the best pdf reader, so far I saw it is able to rendering all the type of PDF (PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/UA, PDF/VT, PDF/X) but not all the PDF reader for Linux are able to display correctly for example PDF-X1 type. By the way I don't remember that you can copy text from Mupdf or doing some other basic action, it is just a reader.